Inflammatory Biomarkers Predictive of Psychopathology in Children With Physical Illness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: While evidence shows that children with chronic physical illness are at increased risk for psychopathology, the causal mechanisms linking physical and mental illness early in life remain unconfirmed. OBJECTIVE: Given a lack of longitudinal studies investigating inflammatory responses in the context of child psychopathology, and none that specifically sample children with chronic physical illness, this study evaluated associations between inflammatory biomarkers and psychopathology in children with chronic physical illness over a 48-month period. METHODS: Data come from 128 children enrolled in the Multimorbidity in Children and Youth across the Life-course (MY LIFE) study who provided baseline dried blood samples for biomarker analysis and completed the 48-month assessment (mean age 11.0 years, 50.0% male). Psychopathology was measured using parent and child reports on the Emotional Behavioural Scales. Dried blood samples were assayed using the Bio-Plex 200 system. Linear mixed models, adjusted for age and sex, estimated associations between inflammatory biomarkers and child psychopathology over time. RESULTS: = 13.27, p = 0.04). Elevated levels of granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) were associated with higher parent-reported internalizing symptoms (β = 0.09 [0.04]), whereas elevated granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) was associated with child-reported (β = 1.83 [0.46]) and parent-reported total symptoms (β = 1.52 [0.69]), as well as child-reported internalizing (β = 1.35 [0.28]) and parent-reported externalizing symptoms (β = 0.72 [0.30]). Elevated IL-6 was associated with lower child-reported total symptoms (β = -0.87 [0.27]) and parent-reported externalizing symptoms (β = -0.35 [0.16]) over time. CONCLUSION: Findings are not definitive evidence of a causal mechanism for physical-mental comorbidity in children but are consistent with reports in other populations. The predictive power of G-CSF, GM-CSF, and IL-6 supports the need for broader blood panels and routine mental health assessment, particularly for children on treatments that disrupt regulatory inflammatory pathways.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".